Soul Searchings

Elaine and I spent the past weekend across the border. It wasn’t exactly the ideal time for this excursion, seeing as how the Canadian dollar had fallen by a whopping 15% in the previous two weeks, down to just 84¢ to the American dollar, but we had this outing planned since two months ago. Back in August, Super 8 had a 888 promo, where starting on 8/8/8, for 8 days starting at 8pm EST each night, the first 800 reservations made online to any of their motels would only cost $8.88. I decided to try my luck, and was fortunate enough to nab a reservation for this past Saturday.

We took to the road at 6am Saturday morning and got to the border half an hour later. By this time, the lineup was about an hour long. After getting through, I drove down to Bellingham where a station there had gas for $2.89 per gallon, which works out to be 76.9¢ USD per liter. What’s interesting is that many of the gas stations down in Washington State, including all the Arco stations, do NOT accept credit cards! When I first found that out that they only accepted cash or debit on my previous trip, I was bewildered. This time, I went prepared with cash. Some stations do accept credit cards, but they generally cost about 30¢ more per gallon.

Our first stop was the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my memory is notoriously bad, so I can’t even recall when was the last time I had visited a zoo, or if I had even been to a zoo at all. Whatever the case, it took almost four hours to finish our tour of the facilities, and it was quite enjoyable overall.

Our next stop was Southcenter Mall, which after the completion of a large expansion in July, became the largest shopping center in Washington State. It’s a pretty nice looking mall, and the first that I can remember having carpeting in the mall corridors.

We checked into Super 8 after that, and the plan was to head out to GameWorks later that night, but I was quite pleasantly surprised to discover that the lineup of TV channels included one that had a feed for CBC - meaning that I was able to watch the Canucks game on Hockey Night in Canada, down in Seattle! I’m pretty glad I watched the game, because it was a doozy, where we came back from being down 3-1 to defeat Calgary 5-4 in overtime. There’s something about this year’s Canucks that has a distinctly different flavour about them, where even when they’re down a couple goals, you get the feeling that the game isn’t over yet. This was something that definitely wasn’t true the previous couple years. Anyways, Elaine actually ended up falling asleep while I was watching the game, so I decided to skip GameWorks for the night and go tomorrow instead, which ended up working out very well.

On Sunday, we were up by 9am, and after a quick complimentary breakfast of cereal and pastries, we headed out to the Japanese Gardens. Because it was quite chilly outside, we decided to skip it. Instead, we headed downtown for GameWorks. Parking is pretty bad in the area, worse than downtown Vancouver. Most parking lots in the area were charging $7 for two hours of parking, even on a weekend. Fortunately after circling around a couple times, we found one lot near 6th Avenue and Pine Street that had a flat rate of $7 for weekend parking, and it’s a good thing I did.

One of the main things I wanted to do on this trip was to play Ferrari F355 Challenge for the first time in about five years. Back in the day when I was playing often and got my world record lap times, I had always wanted to record myself playing, but never got the chance to due to lack of equipment. I finally got my hands on a camcorder a couple years ago, but by then all the F355 cabinets had disappeared locally. Over the years, I had posted a couple videos on Youtube of races I had done on the Dreamcast version of the game, but they were nowhere close to what I did on the arcade version. On numerous occassions, people called me a liar because they could not believe that the lap times I claimed to have done were possible, despite the fact that I had pictures of the lap times as evidence. This was my one chance to get some proof that I really did accomplish what I did in the game.

I didn’t expect to be able to match my old records, and I knew that there would be a re-learning curve to my nazodrifting technique, but I didn’t anticipate it being as difficult as it was! I ended up playing for almost four full hours, and after all was said and done, I was still nowhere close to my previous records. I was about three seconds slower on Monza, and five seconds slower on Sugo. However, it wasn’t a complete wasted effort, as those laps would still be considered very impressive by most, and at the very least it’ll help to prove that at one time, I really was as good as I had claimed to be. For my efforts, I walked away with a strange feeling of both disappointment and satisfaction. I also walked away with six blisters on my left hand from all the nazodrifting.

One definite positive was that this endeavour cost me a lot less than I would have anticipated. Back in the day, the local machines started with under 80 seconds on the clock for driving mode on Sugo, with extra time given for passing checkpoints. I was fast enough that my lap times were almost the same as the extra time given, so on average I was only losing a couple seconds per lap. The longest game I played was over 28 minutes long, where I was on my 22nd lap - pretty good value for a dollar. However, on the machine at GameWorks, it had a ridiculous amount of time on the clock to start, about 240 seconds, or three times as much. Theoretically, if this was back in the day, I’d be able to play close to 90 minutes and do over sixty laps, all on one credit, which is only 75¢. Alas, that was then, and this is now, and I was struggling to find my form. Despite having many terrible laps, each game still lasted fifteen minutes or more, so all in all I only spent about $7.50 for the four hours I was there.

After that, we headed back north to Lynnwood, where we did some more shopping at Alderwood Mall. For dinner, we went to Claim Jumper, where I had gone with the guys a few months ago. I had forgotten how big their portions were, and I got epically owned. Elaine decided to get the appetizer platter, and I went for the full rack of beef ribs. The appetizer platter was monstrous, with buffalo wings, mozarella sticks, potato skins, cheesy potato cakes, and an absolute mountain of onion rings. We were both full with half the platter still remaining, and we hadn’t even started on the giant plate of beef ribs. We ended up only eating one rib and packing all the rest up to go. We stayed at the Courtyard Marriott for the second night, which cost about US$100 through Priceline.

On Monday, we headed north again to the Seattle Premium Outlets for round three of shopping. I was more interested in going to the Wal-Mart Supercenter after that. They have so many unique foods that aren’t available here, and Elaine and I just love getting new snack foods and drinks to try. I decided that we’re going to start a gallery of interesting food products that we come across, just for fun. Finally, we continued north and stopped at Bellis Fair where we did the last bit of shopping and did more household shopping at Target. All in all, we bought about $800 worth of merchandise, of which only about $80 of that was mine. There was no lineup at the border by the time we got there at 11pm, and we were waved through without incident. That concluded a very enjoyable weekend!